The novelist, journalist and broadcaster picks five of his favourite books. His latest book, “The Quantity Theory of Morality”, is published by Grove Press at £18.99.
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800
François-René de Chateaubriand
A revolutionary aristocrat’s memoir that doubles as one of literature’s deepest studies of the human soul. It imagines its author speaking from beyond death, addressing a future that cannot wound him.
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Being and Time
Martin Heidegger, 1927; translated by Joan Stambaugh
I reread Heidegger while facing a stem-cell transplant whose odds resembled Russian roulette. Being and Time teaches the discipline of confronting one’s own finitude – death not as abstraction but as the horizon that makes life meaningful. Whatever Heidegger’s political sins, his philosophy restores a clarity our therapeutic culture fears.
Against Nature (À rebours)
J.K. Huysmans, 1884; translated by Robert Baldick
The great novel of cultivated withdrawal. Huysmans’ hero, des Esseintes, barricades himself indoors to pursue aesthetic excess and spiritual exhaustion. A handbook for decadent reclusion – and for anyone confronting illness, solitude or the suspicion that civilisation itself may be slightly unwell.
The Epistle to the Romans
Karl Barth, 1922; translated by E.C. Hoskyns
Barth detonated early 20th-century theology with this furious commentary on Paul. If Heidegger explores the structure of being, Barth reminds us that ethics concerns action. His theology drags metaphysics back into the moral arena.
Jackdaw Cake
Norman Lewis, 1985
Lewis’ memoir of growing up in 1920s Enfield is one of the few books to treat London suburbia as a genuine habitat rather than a cultural punchline. As I walk the city’s suburban margins, Lewis reminds me that these supposedly dull territories contain entire civilisations.
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